"Paterson": two-paragraph review

Jim Jarmusch is a director of dramas who hates drama. His latest film, "Paterson," is a quiet exploration of poetic reality infusing prosaic lives. The movie's cast includes Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, William Jackson Harper, Chasten Harmon, Barry Shabaka Henley, Kara Hayward, Masatoshi Nagase, and Method Man (apparently as himself). The movie is recursive and symbolic: for instance, Adam Driver plays a bus driver named Paterson who lives and works in Paterson, New Jersey; Paterson writes poetry in his spare time, and one of his favorite poets is William Carlos Williams, who lived in Paterson and once wrote a massive epic poem titled Paterson. See what I mean about recursive? The fusion of the poetic and the prosaic is the movie's fundamental theme; the narrative is structured like a poem, with many gentle repetitions and recurrences in an otherwise ordinary life. The story has few moments of actual tension and conflict, almost as if Jarmusch were aiming to create the world's first drama-free drama. Stolid, stoic Paterson the bus driver is married to beautiful, sunny Laura (Farahani), an artistic soul who dreams of both running her own cupcake bakery and becoming a country-music star. She's supportive of Paterson's poetry, which he jots into a notebook whenever he has a free moment—poetry that is mainly observations of daily life and the little things. Laura's art, when she's designing curtains or cupcake patterns, tends to be either squiggles or circles: the nonlinear and the cyclical, two major tropes in the film. Eager to see her husband's work published, Laura makes Paterson promise to go to a copy shop and get his notebook of poetry copied—a first step to having the poems published "to share with the world." Paterson's routine varies little from day to day, and we cycle through a week that goes from Monday to Monday: Paterson wakes up next to Laura, eats cereal, arrives early at his bus, scribbles parts of a poem, talks with his beleaguered Indian-American foreman, drives the bus, comes home, walks the dog, visits the local bar during his walk, drinks a single beer, then goes home. I'm still not clear on when he eats dinner, but he somehow manages to squeeze dinner in. Laura is generally a good cook, but sometimes she breaks Paterson's harmonious routine when she introduces some new culinary idea that falls flat, like her cheese-and-Brussels-sprouts pie, which Paterson gamely downs while drinking copious amounts of water. But Laura, as a dreamer, seems on occasion to be a prophet: early on, she tells Paterson that she has dreamed of their children, who will be twins. From then on, Paterson encounters pair after pair of twins: another eruption of the poetic into the prosaic.

I should have liked this film more than I did; the narrative structure alone is fascinating in that, the more you think about it, the more complexity it reveals despite being so deceptively simple on the surface. But that aspect of the film possesses an appeal that is only intellectual, the way I find electronica intellectually interesting (because it's so explicitly mathematical) but ultimately dull and sterile. Director Jarmusch gives us only a few grudging drops of drama: Paterson is in the bar when his lovelorn acquaintance Everett (Harper) pulls out a gun and threatens to kill himself; Paterson grabs the gun and immobilizes Everett, but the gun turns out to be a Nerf-bullet shooter. On another day, Paterson's bus breaks down, but we don't see how the situation is resolved. Any drama in the film is undercut, either through a kind of irony (foam bullets) or through editing (not showing us the bus-breakdown resolution). The film's biggest tragedy occurs when something terrible happens to Paterson's notebook of poetry, but this is followed by a near-mystical scene in which Paterson, sitting on a bench and staring at a waterfall (itself a recurrent trope), meets a Japanese traveler who gives Paterson a gift that compensates, at least partly, for the notebook tragedy. It's all very beautiful, but despite the deft blending of themes and metaphors, despite the excellent acting by all of the cast (Driver and Farahani have a weird but pleasant chemistry), "Paterson" left me rather empty. Oh, I forgot to mention that, whenever Paterson writes poems in his notebook, we see his words on the screen and hear Paterson reciting his verse in voiceover...and the poetry is plain horrible. This may, in fact, have been the film's biggest turn-off. I don't mind that Paterson's poetry is free, blank verse, but Jesus, where's the eloquence?